July302017

Portrait of Mateo

Mixed media on Plywood

(little bit of a backstory) I’m from Singapore and Mateo is from NY, i met him while he was travelling South East Asia. The first day we started talking he had a flight to catch later that day, he was leaving for Thailand for a month to start work on his debut novel. Something told me (and him, as he later told me) that we had to find a way to meet or we’d slip by each other, so we met, had coffee and hung out for 2 hours, and then he left to catch his flight. While he was in Thailand we spoke nearly every day, and after a month had passed he bought a ticket back to Singapore to visit me. We spent those 2 weeks while he was here living life the way i imagine we would if we were from the same place - just spending time together doing mundane daily activities instead of more exciting novelty tourist-type ones, and then he left. We still keep in touch, but we both know what we have will never be more than the temporary thing it was, since we live so far apart. I drew this portrait and gave it to him as a parting gift, as a little solid reminder of the now intangible thing we had for a while.